You are a sodbuster, a claim-jumper, and a fizzlewit, sirrah! I defy your imaginary asserted claims on numbers. Numbers do not subscribe to the claims of moldy-minded humans. They roam large and free in an intricate dance known only to the purest of minds, beyond the boundaries of your poor shadow-cave, and the reach of puerile mewling egos. Numbers must be FREE!

Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

Conference proceedings removed from subscription databases after scientist reveals that they were computer-generated.

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.

Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are "reviewed for merits and contents".) The authors of the paper, entitled 'TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce', write in the abstract that they "concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact". (Nature News has attempted to contact the conference organizers and named authors of the paper but received no reply; however at least some of the names belong to real people. The IEEE has now removed the paper).

How to create a nonsense paper

Labbé developed a way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers. SCIgen was invented in 2005 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers ? and, as they put it, "to maximize amusement" (see 'Computer conference welcomes gobbledegook paper'). A related program generates random physics manuscript titles on the satirical website arXiv vs. snarXiv. SCIgen is free to download and use, and it is unclear how many people have done so, or for what purposes. SCIgen's output has occasionally popped up at conferences, when researchers have submitted nonsense papers and then revealed the trick.

Labbé does not know why the papers were submitted ? or even if the authors were aware of them. Most of the conferences took place in China, and most of the fake papers have authors with Chinese affiliations. Labbé has emailed editors and authors named in many of the papers and related conferences but received scant replies; one editor said that he did not work as a program chair at a particular conference, even though he was named as doing so, and another author claimed his paper was submitted on purpose to test out a conference, but did not respond on follow-up. Nature has not heard anything from a few enquiries.

"I wasn't aware of the scale of the problem, but I knew it definitely happens. We do get occasional e-mails from good citizens letting us know where SCIgen papers show up," says Jeremy Stribling, who co-wrote SCIgen when he was at MIT and now works at VMware, a software company in Palo Alto, California.

"The papers are quite easy to spot," says Labbé, who has built a website where users can test whether papers have been created using SCIgen. His detection technique, described in a study1 published in Scientometrics in 2012, involves searching for characteristic vocabulary generated by SCIgen. Shortly before that paper was published, Labbé informed the IEEE of 85 fake papers he had found. Monika Stickel, director of corporate communications at IEEE, says that the publisher "took immediate action to remove the papers" and "refined our processes to prevent papers not meeting our standards from being published in the future". In December 2013, Labbé informed the IEEE of another batch of apparent SCIgen articles he had found. Last week, those were also taken down, but the web pages for the removed articles give no explanation for their absence. . .

Read the rest at the site. And don't get carried away, I know some of you already know how to do this. :)

That is a very good point. I think that following the regulations espoused in various RFCs (such as 1924, 1926, and 1437, to same but a few) and the standards contained therein would maximize the minimality of such gibberish.

I think that your statements should be posted so that a statistically valid sampling might be obtained which would in all probability allow us to verify (within the limits of accuracy inherent in all statistical studies) the linguistic content (if any) and structural cohesiveness of your previous post, Amos. Structural algorithms might be found which would assist in such a study and similar studies in the future.

Do you know what would have happened if I hadn't put the freshly washed clothes in the dryer? I would have had to put them in the dryer near dawn tomorrow and say ten Holy Fuck Mes. WHEW!

So, where were we? Oh, yeah, waxing poetitechnicjargonly about whatever the fuck.

Ya know, even with all this excitement and mellowodrama, I still wonder why all the LHs haven't posted in so long. Could it actually be that our certified beyond belief bachelor has found true love and is gettin his old ass shagged THAT much?

Or did he get a new puppy? Hmmm... nah. If it was a puppy, there would be pics. If he's shaggin, I don't want pics.

I woke at the crack of dawn, stuffed the crack and went back to sleep. Why is always a sunny morn when I want to, and can, sleep in? I gotta get me one a them there sleep alert thingamabobs what the truckers got fer makin sure they don't nod off whilst runnin their rigs down the highway. Fallin asleep in front of the boob tube screws up my natural acadian rhythm, not to mention my neck.

How come rhythm has an h where it shouldn't and no vowel where it should?

Because it comes from the Welsh via Irish, where they toss letters around like they had a lot of them. Be glad -- the original word was "rhwyaighmyia" and meant "the sound of pounding rocks together at the dance at the crossroads so there is a beat for people to dance to". Notice that the definition ends in a preposition, which shows it wasn't English.

WinCo, Costco and Shopco went To sea in a pea-green boat. They took their honeys, and lots of money To keep the damn thing afloat. Said CostyCO and Winco to Shopco, "Friend, Should we raise the minimum pay?" Said Shopco, "Boys, Just screw that noise, It would cost me half a day."

Mom's favorite wanker is out of commission apparently--perhaps he got stuck at Winco. So I will save Mom from lurking in the nether regions, which, come to think of it, may be what is preoccupying our favorite son.

We just got a WinCo here. It looks a lot like our defunct "Sack N' Save" warehouse grocery stores except cleaner. And a better bulk section. I wouldn't shop there often, just when I need a few of their unprocessed foods I can stock up on and freeze, like steel cut oats.

I...am in Logan, UT. Contrary to anything Eiseley may say, Aggies do NOT live in caves, never wash, and eat their young. Unlike the University of Utah, Utah State University has a very nice on-campus ice cream and cheese shop, where the products sold are the result of work at USU. Yesterday I had a chocolate and habanero ice cream sundae with ketchup topping.

'Cougar Gold'. Is that porn with older good lookin guys? Where do we sign up? Amos and Rap and I could fill a calendar. Dunno about Pete. (Yer welcome I left that joke out.) As fer the LHs, well, Chongo would have to shave and that would take a loooong time. LH hisself wouldn't fit in any pics if his hair was included. Penny ain't right at all.

But, I figger the three of us could well fill out a calendar, nudge nudge, wink wink, eh? Know what I'm sayin, eh? Of course, Rap would have to wield his epee.

So, Kaspersky said today... after at least six hours of screwing with it over the past two days... Nope. OS is not supported. Took a pic of that on the screen, copied it to a flash and Dave is gonna see it tomorrow and he will refund me.

Norton will work. I usually wait until it's on sale at places like Fry's. Right now they have a sale of Norton Internet Security with a licence for 3 PCs for $39.99 It's bundled with an Anti-Theft and Mobile device software. http://www.frys.com/ads/page8#AdNavi. You'll see other specials on the page. The sale is good through March 6.

We just use AVG free, Free Windows Registry Repair, Malbyteware, Spybot Search and Destroy -- all free editions, of course. They pretty much cover the problems, especially if you activate the Windows firewall (if you're using Windoze, of course).

I use free also, and an enterprise antivirus from work (they want employees to have clean computers at home also, to prevent bringing in viruses if we work at home). I like AVG and Avast - I recommended those but he seems to have struggled with them some.